I'm in the same boat – LibreOffice 4.3.2.2 under Windows Pro 8.1 on a touchscreen tablet/ultrabook hybrid [1] – and I too am searching for ways to make LibreOffice Writer touch-friendly. For instance, the only way to scroll through an open document is the fiddly little scroll bar on the right of the document's window – designed to be accessed by mouse/trackpad/trackball, it's a real pain to use by fingertip (and being forced to pull out the stylus for more accurate scrolling only highlights LibreOffice's lack touch gesture support).

Q. Does anybody have any info getting LibreOffice to distinguish between a swipe gesture to scroll a document up and down, and a tap-hold-drag to select text within a document?

Thanks in advance for your time and attention. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Hi Miguel, and apologies for assuming your name was Mario. Thanks for your encouraging response – please see [UPDATE #2] at the top of my answer for details of where your encouragement has led me. Warm regards, Tim

...which – with a little tweaking – has led to not only the addition of my desired ‘Search with Google’ functionality, but also to adding ‘Search with Ecosia’, ‘Search with OneLook’, AND ‘Google Translate’ functionality too: RESULT!

Since I rate his Translator's Tools extension for Writer so highly, I’ve chosen to put my money where my mouth is, and donated $10 to this wonderful extension’s developer Sergei Medvedev, via the project’s Donate link at SourceForge.

I’ve also emailed Sergei to ask if he could please make me a custom recompilation of the extension installer binary file, incorporating the ‘Search with Ecosia/OneLook/Google UK’ customisations mentioned in UPDATEs #1 + #2 below – as illustrated in this before-&-after maquette:

Here’s hoping that, before too long, I’ll not only be continuing to enjoy the delicious cake of Translator's Tools websearch functionality, but also the icing on the cake of custom websearch menu items.

Warm regards,

Tim

PS: I’m also deriving wry entertainment from the way my karma score and badge count hereabouts keep on rising as a result of this thread’s expansion and popularity. I guess this is one example of the way in which the gamer culture staples of (1) an ever-rising score and (2) striving to attain achievement awards is coming to cross-fertilise net-mediated social discourse – and I for one really rather like it. { sappy grin }

[UPDATE #2]

Hi Miguel, and apologies for my previously assuming your name was Mario.

I like trying to be the change I want to see in the world, so paying forward a Very Useful Improvement in a way that may assist other folk seeking just such an improvement is my pleasure – and thank you for your appreciation.

Following your welcome suggestion, I’ve taken a look a the Translator's Tools source code. I’ve identified the source of the four changes that I’d like to make, and prepared modified versions of the appropriate files:

file: addon.xcu – modded to include menu item titles ‘Search with Ecosia’, ‘Search with OneLook’, and ‘Search with Google UK’

However, having taken a look at the Extensions Development wiki page (» https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Exte... ), it looks like I might be facing several hours of climbing a steep learning curve to understand how to incorporate these and the other Translator's Tools source files into a recompiled translatortools_1.02_eog.oxt extension installer binary file (which seems rather disproportionate to me).

So I’ll be asking Translator's Tools maintainer Sergei Medvedev if he could please do this modified recompilation for me; and if yourself or any other readers have sufficient OOo/LibreOffice extension development skills that such a modified recompilation would be an easy favour which you could offer me, I’d be most grateful for such ...

If there’s one thing I miss from my OS X days it’s this: in the simple OS-bundled word processor TextEdit I could select text, right-click to bring up the context menu, and choose ‘Search with Google’ – TextEdit would then pass my text selection to the Safari web browser, which would display Google web search results for my text selection as a search query term, in a new tab.

I know that LibreOffice can open a website URL – such as https://www.google.co.uk – with a Ctrl-click on the hyperlinked text in a Writer document; on my new Win8.1 tablet, it seems the URL is handed over to the default application for https (in my case Firefox browser), and the linked website appears in a new Firefox tab. Very. Useful. Indeed! So my question is:

Q: Does a LibreOffice extension already exist that adds a TextEdit-like ‘Search with Google’ context menu item to Writer?

For instance, if I selected the word “elephant” while writing in a LibreOffice Writer file, I’d like to be able to right-click to bring up the context menu, then click on a new ‘Search with Google’ context menu item – this would then incorporate my text selection into a Google web search query URL (such as https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=ele... ), pass the query URL to my default web browser, which would open a new tab and fill it with Google web search results for the search term “elephant”. Even. MORE. Useful!! Wouldn’t you agree?

Question is, does such a ‘Search with Google’ LibreOffice Writer extension already exist?

If yes – could you please point me in the right direction for me to acquire it. (BTW, I have tried searching for such an extension, but come up empty.)

If no – could I please invite a coding genius volunteer to write such a ‘Search with Google’ LibreOffice Writer extension to step forward?

I’m aware that there may well be a particular place in the LibreOffice community’s web presence where folk with appropriate LibreOffice coding genius expertise might best be recruited for such an extension-crafting task – so any pointers as to where that place may be would also be most gratefully received, too.